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Using Search Engine–Supplied SEO Tools

Google and Bing both make an active effort to communicate with
webmasters and publishers and provide some very useful tools for SEO
professionals.

Search Engine Webmaster Tools

Although we have referred to the Webmaster Tools provided by
Google and Bing throughout the book, it is worth going into these in
greater depth. Using Webmaster Tools is a great way to see how the
search engines perceive your site.

First, let’s clear up a popular misconception. Setting up and
using a Google WMT or Bing WMT account provides no new information about
your site to the search engines. That is not the purpose of these
tools.

This becomes clear when you learn how the tools are set up. You
can create a Webmaster Tools account with either Google or Bing quite
easily. An important part of creating these accounts is verifying your
ownership of the site. To do that, you have two options:

Place a search engine–supplied meta tag on the home page of
your domain.

Place a special file as specified by the search engine in the
root directory of your web server.

Neither of these actions changes or enhances the search engine’s
ability to access information about your website.

The intent of these tools is to provide publishers with data on
how the search engines view their sites. This is incredibly valuable
data that publishers can use to diagnose site problems. We recommend
that all publishers leverage both of these tools on all of their
websites.

In the following sections, we will ...

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